Contents

Course Motivation

Database transaction processing systems occupy a central position in our
information-based society. Virtually every large system with which we interact
in our daily lives has a database at its core: from simple supermarket checkout
systems to life critical air traffic control systems. Over the next decades, we
will become increasingly dependent on the correctness and efficiency of such
systems.

Course Overview

This course is about the theory and practice underlying the design of
correct and efficient applications involving transactional access to a
database. Each concept introduced in the course is reinforced in a laboratory
project where student groups are asked to use the transactional concept and
analyze the consequences of its use in an application implementation.

Course Objectives

Provide
the students of this course with a deep understanding of:

·ACID (atomicity, consitency, isolation, durability) properties of
transactions and their implications on system correctness and performance.

·Various transaction processing
models and how these models influence the design of applications involving
transactional access to a database..

·Implementation and support of ACID
properties in modern relational and non-relational database trenasaction
processing systems..

·Modern architectures of distributed
transaction processing systems and their influence on security, replication and
ACID properties.

Course Prerequisites

The official prerequisite of this course is CSE/ISE 305: Introduction to
Database Systems.

Students will work in teams of two on the projects. Both members of the team
are expected to know the code. You are advised to start working on the projects
at the earliest possible time even if the deadlines are far away. The date the
projects are due will be clearly specified in the project handout, on the web;
any changes in deadlines will be posted on the course homepages.

Projects are due by 11:59pm on the specified date. Late projects will be
penalized at the rate of 20% per day. So, there is no point submitting a
project more than 4 days late! Each team can submit one project late by seven
calendar days (1 week) without late penalty. You don't need to send me mail
about this. No extensions will be allowed beyond this.

Software

JBuilderor NetBeans, TPPT(Transaction Processing Performance Tool)

Communication

This class is project intensive and you may want to exchange ideas and
experience with each other. The best way to do this is by using the news group
created specially for cse515. To subscribe to this
group, proceed as follows (e.g. with the netscape
browser): (1) right click the news.sunysb.edu, (2) select subscribe
to Newsgroups, (3) choose the search panel and search for sbcs.cse515,
(4) select the sbcs.cse515 newsgroup and click on the subscribe
button. Now you are ready to send and retrieve messages.

Course Grading

Your performance on the programming projects will be the major part of the
final grades. In addition, there will be a mid-term exam and a final exam. The
relative weights for the above components will be:

Projects: 35%

Midterm exam: 30%

Final exam: 35%.

Your Rights and Responsibilities

Special Needs

If you have a physical, psychological, medical or learning disability that
may impact on your ability to carry out assigned course work, you are urged to
contact the staff in the Disabled

Because a primary goal of the course is to teach professionalism, any
academic dishonesty will be viewed as evidence that this goal has not been
achieved. Any act of cheating will be treated with utmost seriousness.

You can discuss the course material with other students, but not the
homework assignments themselves. In effect, you can discuss the problems but
not the solutions. If you help another student with a
homework, use examples that do not resemble those in the homework.
Remember that there are many different ways to solve the same problem; even
solutions with the same central idea can be formulated in many different ways.
Therefore, suspiciously similar homework solutions will be considered as
evidence of disallowed collaboration or copying.

In case you have any questions about whether an act of collaboration may
constitute "cheating", please come and talk to the instructor
beforehand to clarify the issue.

Copying an assignment from another student in this class or obtaining a
solution from some other source will lead to an automatic F for this course and
to a disciplinary action. Allowing another student to copy one's work will be
treated as an act of academic dishonesty, leading to the same penalty as
copying. You should learn how to protect your data. Failure to do so is also
unprofessional and it may expose you to the danger that someone will copy your
homework and will submit it as his or her own (see above). In this case, you
may be given a score of 0 for the assignment in question (and the other party
will get an F).

All cases of academic dishonesty will be reviewed by the Engineeing
College's committee (CASA).

Survival Tips

Do not postpone working on assignments. Start working on programming
assignments as soon as they are handed out. Do not wait till the day before the
deadline. You will see that assignments take much more time when you work on
them under pressure, than when you are more relaxed. Remember that no late
submissions are allowed.

Do not postpone working on assignments! This cannot be understated. Despite
the above warning, most students will end up working only around the deadline.
Remember, the homeworks usually take more time that
it initially appears. Furthermore, I expect both the TA and me to be swamped on
the office hours before projects are due. So, you, being wiser than the rest,
should start earlier and beat the rush!

Design before you code. Writing a well designed piece of code is always
easier than staring with some code that "almost works" and adding
patches to make it "really work".

Follow good programming discipline. Why spend hours debugging when you can
party? A little bit of thought before you do some esoteric pointer manipulation
will save you a lot of time, headache and may be a grade!